Age gating laws/reasoning/outcomes

Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform

By now you’ve almost certainly heard the news that Meta has settled with 52 state and local Attorneys General who had sued the company in some form or another over child safety on Meta’…

Meta's $17 Billion Settlement is a Bad Deal for Teens and All Social

Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. In this post, we go through the Settlement’s provisions in detail.

California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law — software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt

AB 1856 excludes open-source operating systems from the upcoming Digital Age Assurance Act.

Australia’s Teen Social Media Ban Is Just Training A Generation In The Art Of The Workaround

We’ve been covering Australia’s under-16 social media ban since before it went into effect, first noting the confusion and obvious implementation problems as pretty much everyone realiz…

Report supporting Australia’s teen social media ban appears to contain AI hallucinations, Senate hears

Exclusive: Guardian analysis finds one section of report includes links to academic articles that do not exist, but authors deny the references were made up by AI

The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

Update: On August 5, 2026, The Senate Commerce Committee voted 15-13 to advance this bill, but the bill did not advance because of a lack of Senators in attendance. EFF continues to oppose the bill.

20 shared papers

Hall JA Ten myths about the effect of social media use on well-being J. Med. Internet Res. • Dissing AS et al. Smartphone interactions and mental well-being in young adults: A longitudinal study based on objective high-resolution smartphone data Scand. J. Public Health • Beyens I et al. The effect of social media on well-being differs from adolescent to adolescent Sci. Rep. • Valkenburg PM Social media use and well-being: What we know and what we need to know Curr. Opin. Psychol. • Panova T et al. Is smartphone addiction really an addiction? J. Behav. Addict. • Heffer T et al. The longitudinal association between social-media use and depressive symptoms among adolescents and young adults: An empirical reply to Twenge et al. (2018) Clin. Psychol. Sci. • Stavrova O et al. Does using social media jeopardize well-being? The importance of separating within- from between-person effects Soc. Psychol. Personal. Sci. • Lawrence D et al. Reciprocal relationships between trajectories of loneliness and screen media use during adolescence J. Child Fam. Stud. • Cunningham S et al. Social media and depression symptoms: A meta-analysis Res. Child Adolesc. Psychopathol. • Hall JA et al. Experimentally manipulating social media abstinence: results of a four-week diary study Media Psychol. • Panayiotou M et al. Time spent on social media among the least influential factors in adolescent mental health: preliminary results from a panel network analysis Nat. Ment. Health • Johannes N et al. Objective, subjective, and accurate reporting of social media use: No evidence that daily social media use correlates with personality traits, motivational states, or well-being Technol. Mind Behav. • Johannes N et al. No effect of different types of media on well-being Sci. Rep. • Meier A et al. Computer-mediated communication, social media, and mental health: A conceptual and empirical meta-review Communic. Res. • Bruce LD et al. Loneliness in the United States: A 2018 national panel survey of demographic, structural, cognitive, and behavioral characteristics Am. J. Health Promot. • Schemer C et al. The impact of Internet and social media use on well-being: A longitudinal analysis of adolescents across nine years J. Comput. Mediat. Commun. • Hall JA et al. Two tests of social displacement through social media use Inf. Commun. Soc. • Hampton KN Social media and change in psychological distress over time: The role of social causation J. Comput. Mediat. Commun. • Steinsbekk S et al. The new social landscape: Relationships among social media use, social skills, and offline friendships from age 10-18 years Comput. Human Behav. • Odgers CL The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? Nature